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| Photo By MSO PR |
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Big Head Todd and the Monsters
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With an amazing 22-year history and a fiercely loyal fan base, it's no surprise that Big Head Todd and the Monsters are talking big numbers on their new album, the recently released
All the Love You Need. For a band whose major label debut, 1993's
Sister Sweetly, sold well over a million copies,
All the Love You Need looks like a similar winner with 250,000 units shipped since late last year.
But you'll never see the album with a bullet on the Heatseekers sales chart in Billboard. You won't see the Denver Blues/Rock quartet mentioned in any sales tabulation at all. That's because the quarter million copies of All the Love You Need that have been mailed out so far have been given away. Free. It's safe to assume downloading won't be eating into the band's bottom line on this one.
"It wasn't until the album was completed and we started talking about the best way to deal with it," says guitarist/vocalist/songwriter Todd Park Mohr. "That's when our manager had the idea."
Given that there's no national chart spikes or regional sales data to help Mohr and the band gauge how well they're doing in specific markets, the best indicator of the giveaway's success has been a definite upsurge in gig attendance. Between higher gate numbers and the audience's familiarity with the new songs, Mohr says the free release has been a resounding triumph.
"I think pretty consistently they are higher," Mohr says of the increased attendance figures. "But more importantly to me, people are wanting to hear the new material. It brings an energy of newness to our show."
The first phase of the giveaway began late last year when the album was shipped free to everyone on the Big Head Todd mailing list, an impressive 25,000 names. Within weeks, radio stations in Denver, Austin, San Diego and Kansas City had all gotten behind the unusual promotion -- corporate sponsors helped absorb the cost of physical production and the radio stations picked up the mailing costs -- sending tens of thousands of copies of the disc to their subscriber lists.
"We're still in the process of mailing stuff out, but, ultimately, before the next couple of months are done, we'll have a half-million units mailed out for free," Mohr says. "It's pretty cool."
Equally cool is the album itself. By no means a release defined by other similar handout discs -- singles, EPs, demos or remixes often get the free treatment -- All the Love You Need is the full-length, legitimate new release from Big Head Todd and the Monsters. And it might well be one of the best releases in the band's illustrious catalog.
"About half of the songs I started writing a couple of years prior, so the material represents a long period of time for me as a writer," Mohr says. "I've been having a lot of life changes in terms of relationships -- divorce, specifically -- and I'm obviously a writer who writes about relationships so I think I have more of a multi-faceted collection of songs in that regard on this record."
Along with the added emotional grist for Mohr's songwriting mill, the guitarist allowed some new sonic elements to work their way into his already diverse melting pot of Blues/Classic Rock with a sinewy Indie groove.
"There are a number of different things going on with this material," Mohr says. "There's kind of a Hip Hop aspect to songs like 'All the Love You Need' or 'Ever Since You Pulled Me Under.' There are a lot of R&B and Pop elements in those songs that are unusual for our repertoire. And I think there's an overt, all-out Rock & Roll aspect to the album as a whole that's very Punk Rock-inspired to me. Groups like the Clash and the Pretenders and even Springsteen are referenced a lot. It's just kind of an energy that I've been striving for a long time, over the course of the last several albums."
It's almost a foregone conclusion that any artist looks at their latest work as their best, but there is a clear sense, both within the Big Head Todd camp as well as among the broader media/industry contingent, that All the Love You Need easily stands with Sister Sweetly, the band's platinum standard to date. Mohr is particularly proud of his writing on the new album.
"I think the songs are great," he says. "I think there are a wide range of styles, but I think all of the songs nail it, and I think that's what I'm most proud of."
The live context has always been where Big Head Todd and the Monsters have shone the brightest, and the new songs are proving to be crowd pleasers on the band's current tour.
"They're super fun to play, they're very up-tempo and, as I said, we're already generating a lot of response," Mohr says. "I really feel like the audience loves the new material. As the years go by, with our hit songs, we're always trying to find new ways to look at them. Right now, we're playing every song from this new record in every show of our tour and it's made the shows have a really different energy." ©
BIG HEAD TODD AND THE MONSTERS perform at the Madison Theater in Covington on Tuesday.
